Increasingly, products purchased and services rendered are subject to warranty agreements between a purchaser and a vendor or a service provider. In some cases the warranty agreements are between a purchaser, a service provider, and a vendor or trade contractor. Management of the increasing number of warranties for a single party can be difficult as it requires excessive paperwork and organization. These problems are magnified when multiple parties, i.e. the purchaser, service provider, and vendor, attempt to coordinate their records and schedules to service a product under warranty.
One particularly difficult area of warranty management is in the field of newly built homes. Homeowners contract with home builders to build a new home. The home builders in turn contract with multiple trade contractors, such as electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc., to complete the specialized tasks of home building. Upon completion of a new home, builder warranties exist on a plurality of building services and products that have been installed in the home. When a home requires warranty work, the homeowner, the builder, and the respective trade contractors all must communicate and work together to complete the warranty work. Such codependency exacerbates the problems generally associated with warranty work described above. These problems are further emphasized due to the mobile nature of builders and especially trade contractors, which often produces additional communication and organizational obstacles.
To further confuse the issue, the exact standards of a builder's limited warranty are often poorly defined, or routinely exceeded by the builder. Builders tend to refer to warranty work as “service” work, because each builder will provide the level of service appropriate to their corporate culture and clientele, regardless of inclusion in their warranty standards. Service work and warranty work are handled as one-and-the-same, with a work order being sent to the appropriate contractor. This lack of differentiation between “warranty” and “service” can lead to separate issues, such as whether a contractor performed deficient work and should fix it at their own expense, or a builder is asking for an unnecessary service “extra” and should be required to pay the contractor for this additional work.
More particularly, whether a warranty issue is discovered through a regularly scheduled home walk-through or independently reported by a homeowner, conventional warranty issues center around a paper work order. For each item requiring attention, a paper work order is generated detailing the warranty action necessary, if any, and designating a trade contractor to complete the necessary action. Typically, the builder or other warranty administering party forwards the work order to the designated trade contractor via phone, fax, or mail. Upon notification of the work order the designated trade contractor performs the necessary action to remedy the reported warranty issue and then reports the remedied warranty issue to the builder or other warranty administering party. At which point, the builder or other warranty administering party verifies the remedy of the warranty issue with the homeowner and archives the work order.
This paper communication trail is administratively intense and troublesome when increased in scale to a builder who builds thousands of homes a year and/or applied to a trade contractor who likely services multiple builders. Furthermore, typical trade contractors are extremely mobile in nature as trade contractors are often in and out of their service vehicles for a significant portion of working hours. The mobile nature of typical trade contractors can make paperwork nearly impossible to organize. Often times multiple printed work orders and notes from phone conversations are piled in the service vehicle of the trade contractor with little or no organization. Even if the work orders are handled in an orderly and efficient manner in the Builder's office, there is no consistent treatment of work orders through the hierarchy of builder, to trade contractor, to actual service person, to homeowner. Due in part to this lack of organization and the difficulty in locating and communicating with trade contractors, work orders often remain outstanding for an undesirable length of time frustrating builders and homeowners alike.
This problem is further aggravated by the fact that relatively few builders have a standardized system for reporting work orders and scheduling such work orders to a particular trade contractor. While most builders recognize and even emphasize the importance of placing a high priority on resolving warranty issues, completion of this work can be made difficult due to management and scheduling difficulties surrounding repair of such issues. Consequently, the response time to work order requests can be further extended, thereby, increasing homeowner frustration. Frustrated homeowners often phone the builder to determine the status of work order repairs. Builders often do not have the most up-to-date work order status and must, in turn, call the trade contractor to determine the current work order status and then call the homeowner to relay the information. Not only do the original homeowner phone calls fail to remedy homeowner frustrations, but the calls further inundate the builder with administrative duties, thereby, further increasing the time needed to complete a work order.
In view of the above, a need exists for a system and method of streamlining the warranty work repair process and increasing the ease of communication between the parties involved.